The noise diaries V

Emerging at the end of the last century, Canadian black metal offered a welcome but futile balm at the genre’s nadir, and in many ways its various disconnected iterations reflect the context of deep confusion and misdirection of the period from which it arose. Searching for a way to maintain the iconoclasm baked within metal since the rise of the underground in the early 80s, Canadian artists approached the form in many guises. War metal sought to place black metal technique onto a grindcore template, coating the finished product in the fanciful futurism of cybergoth. Where war metal could be understood as a form of hyper-activism, in both the literal and conceptual sense, others – such as Gris or Sombres Forêts – took the opposite approach by embracing post or depressive black metal, which was essentially a vehicle for expressing total passivity and resignation in the hope that a rumination on the comfy defeatism felt at the turn of the century would lead to some sort of graceful catharsis if nothing else.

And then we have acts like Sorcier Des Glaces and Frozen Shadows, who sort to salvage both the raw materials and spirit of the Norwegian canon. In this sense they could be understood as one of a handful of inevitable aftershocks of the mid-90s Northern European “moment”. The lifespan of Frozen Shadows pretty much spans the duration of this strange turn of the Century episode, with the pleasing but underdeveloped ‘Empires de glace’ demo in 1997 followed by 1999’s ‘Dans les bras des immortels’, which preserves an element of the enigmatic chaos of Immortal’s ‘Pure Holocaust’ with the ghostly synth metal of early Emperor.

Whilst some may lament the lack of distinct identity beyond these clear antecedents, Frozen Shadows were more than capable of articulating an immersive sound world defined both by a unique atmospheric offering, and extended runs of linear, narrative composition informed by ‘In the Nightside Eclipse’. These are interrupted by slower passages and borderline breakdowns which are deployed to articulate moments of dramatic import, with the guitars dissolving to minimalist two chord runs, and keyboards taking over the lead role with simple yet effective harmonic material guided by unabashedly melodramatic vocalisations. Drums frame the chaos by establishing a solid rhythmic base whilst anticipating important crescendos or moments of transition. In this sense they are felt more than they are observable.

With this and the follow up ‘Hantises’ in 2004 – which used the aesthetic austerity of a glass display case to foreground its more complex, longform riff developments – Frozen Shadows remain one of the great lost echoes of black metal at its peak. Proximate enough to bottle some of the residual majesty of Norway in the early 90s, but perhaps lacking a clear enough vision when taken against their European peers. Despite this, ‘Dans les bras des immortels’ remains a richly entrancing curiosity that I never regret returning to despite being intimate with the album for well over twenty years at this point.

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Sticking with Canada, I find myself increasingly compelled to return to Dead Brain Cells’ (DBC) self titled debut recently. Despite still being active on the live circuit, their two album back catalogue lacks the revivalist gravitas of a Voivod or a Coroner. Their reputation remains somewhat obscured as a result. This, despite their second album being an ambitious concept piece covering no less than the entire history of the universe.

That being said, the debut itself remains a cornucopia of curiosities, talking points, and sheer novelty by the standards of thrash/crossover as it was at the time of its release in 1987. There are technical and progressive undertones, but they are deployed solely as a means to an end, that end being to create a dense, urgent, almost frayed duality of meaning. This element, along with lyrics concerned with power, conflict, and mental frailty amount to a compelling document of late Cold War malaise in a way that many of their thrash metal contemporaries never seemed quite capable of articulating.

These more nuanced aspects, along with a generous series of melodic vignettes dispersed throughout the album, are collided against the punk roots of the DBC formula, creating music both cerebral and primally urgent. Quiet contemplation remains the aspiration, one occasionally borne out via extended proto narratives as one idea is passed from riff to riff in memetic forms, before the delicate train of thought is utterly broken by chromatic, blasting chaos with no clear direction or target.

This interchange between the search for meaning beyond a polarised an apparently suicidal world order and the irresistible desire to lash out in formless destruction gets to the heart of where “pre-extreme” metal (for want of a better term) was by the late 80s. Forever attempting to usher the optimism of youth toward a constructive project, but unable to formulate what this might look like in a world increasingly dominated by the emergent neoliberal order and diminishing prospects for a collective escape from the nebulous power of financialisaton.

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The golden goose of Chilean death metal continues to rehabilitate the genre on the global stage, picking up as if the years since 1993 never happening. Grounding their style deep within the bedrock of Floridian innovations, it updates various calling cards through a process of restoration and development. Restoration at one end via a nuanced treatment of a latent thrash DNA, and development at the other through the placement of a subtle progressive ornamentation. Importantly, this is not “genre” progressive death metal as articulated through the ministrations of Pestilence, Atheist, Death, and Cynic. It’s role here – and particularly on Suppression’s 2022 offering ‘The Sorrow of Soul Through Flesh’ – is a bookend, an accent to establish the placement of each phrase and link it to the next via increasingly tangential material.

This cerebral impetus is offset by strikingly violent bursts of percussive, chromatic death metal borrowed from Suffocation and even Gorguts circa ‘The Erosion of Sanity’. The music approaches the ear as self-evidently technical as the term is understood within the vernacular of death metal, but this not the lasting impression left on the listener. Instead one experiences an expertly crafted and highly creative gathering of death metal at its apex and simultaneously the catalyst of its decline in 1993. In this sense Suppression go beyond OSDM in positioning their music as the continuation of an unfinished project. They treat their work as one of resolving the contradictions of the past whilst pointing a way forward, a literal progression anchored by deeply embedded contextual roots.  

The result is a listening experience rewarding more at the intellectual level than the purely artistic, although the album has much to recommend it in the latter regard. Suppression’s strength, like much Chilean death and thrash metal I have thus far encountered, lies in providing an academically rigorous archaeological counterweight to the Disneyfied funfair of populist OSDM currently practiced in the traditional heartlands of death metal across the USA and Northern Europe. I’d speculate that it benefits from a degree of distance from the nihilism permeating both the revivalist culture of Western metal and the despair felt by detractors of this seemingly unending trend. Suppression cut through the endless pearl clutching that defines metal scenes in the Global North, restoring the past with greater detail and clarity than a Tomb Mold or a Necrot, using this granular knowledge to insert their own bespoke developments. This allows them to achieve that rare thing in any genre approaching its middle age, a form of historically informed progressivism.